Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant
Haec tria: mens hilaris, requies, moderata dieta
is the adage of the old Schola Salernitana, and his belief and judgment. Would to God that there were any druggist or apothecary within the king’s dominions where I could procure for you the first ingredient of the recipe, fresh and genuine. I would soon make up the prescription, have the credit of curing you, and then make my fortune by advertising the nostrum under the name of Dr. Samsartorius, Carbonijugius’s Panacea Salernitana——iensis.
You will have thought, I fear, that I had forgotten my promise of sending you Charles Lamb’s epistola porcina. But it was not so. I now enclose it, and when you return it I will make a copy for you if you wish it, for I think that writing in your present state will be most injurious to you.
I am interrupted—“a poor lad, very ragged, he says Mr. Dowling has sent him to you to show you his poetry.”—“Well! desire him to step up, Maria!”
As soon as Mr. Green left me, Mrs. Gillman delivered your letter. I am not sorry, therefore, that the Wild Irish Boy made it too late to finish the above for that day’s post. His name, poor lad! is Esmond Wilton; his mother, I guess, was poetical. But I will reserve him for a dish on our table of chat when we meet.—In reply to your affectionate letter what can I say, but that from all that you say, write or do, I receive but two impressions; first a full, cordial, and unqualified assurance of your love towards me, a genial unclouded faith in the entireness and steadfastness of your more than friendship, sustained and renewed by the consciousness of a responsive attachment in myself, that blends the affections of parent, brother and friend,—
A love of thee that seems, yet cannot greater be;
and secondly, impressions of grief or joy, according, and in proportion to, the information I receive, or the inferences that I draw, respecting your health, ease of heart and mind, and all the events, incidents, and circumstances, that affect, or are calculated to affect, both or either. Only this in addition—whatever else may pass through your mind, never, from any motive, or with any view, withhold from me your thoughts, your feelings, and your sorrows. What if they be momentary, winged thoughts, not native, that blowing weather has driven out of their course, and to which your mind has allowed thorough flight, but neither nest, perch, nor halting room? Send them onward to pass through mine; and between us both, we shall be better able to give a good account of them! What if they are the offspring of low or perturbed spirits—the changelings of ill health or disquietude? So much the rather communicate them. When on the white paper, they are already out of us; and when the letter is gone, they will not stay long behind; the very anticipation of the answer will have answered them, and superseded the need, though not the wish, of its arrival. And shall I not, think you, take them for what they are? With what comfort, with what security, could I receive or read your letters, or you mine, if we either of us had reason to believe, that whatever affliction had befallen, or discomfort was harassing, or anxiety was weighing on the heart, the other would say no word of or about it, under the plea of not transplanting thorns, or whatever other excuse a depressed fancy might invent, in order to transmute unfriendly withholding into a self-sacrifice of tenderness. If you had come to stay with me while I lay on a bed of pain, it would grieve you indeed, if, from an imagined duty of not grieving you, I should suppress every expression of suffering, and not tell you where my pain was, or whether it was greater or less. Grant that I was rendered anxious or heavy at heart, or keenly sorrowful, by any tidings you had communicated respecting yourself! Should it not be so? Ought it not to be so? Will not the Joy be greater when the Cloud is passed off—greater in kind, nobler, better—because I should feel it was my right? And is there not a dignity and a hidden Healing in the suffering itself—which is soothed in the wish and tempered in the endeavour of removing, or lessening, or supporting it, in the Soul of a dear Friend? However trifling my vexations are, yet if they vex me, and I am writing to you, to you I will unbosom them, my dear ... and my serious sorrows and hindrances I will still less keep back from you. General Truths, Discussions, Poems, Queries—all these are parts of my nature, often uppermost; and when they are so, you have them—and I like well to write to, and to hear from you on them—but these I might write to the Public: and with all Christian respect for that gentleman, I love your little finger better than his whole multitudinous Body.
Give my love to Mrs. Allsop, and tell her I will try to deserve hers.
Ever and ever God bless you, my dearest friend.